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The bad Communist

1972. Nixon running for reelection, Watergate still a third-rate burglary, Vietnam raging, the dissident Left moving toward violence. In San Francisco, a Maoist organization makes plans to break a murderer out of prison. A splinter group descends into the nether world of conspiracy and perhaps assassination. A radical professor fights for his job at Stanford University. And King Tyler, a left-wing lawyer, finds himself at a crossroads in his life, an intersection of crises involving his wife, his father, and his politics. From these materials, Max Crawford has made a rich and important novel, a book that is at once riveting in its suspense and absolutely authentic in its evocation of the recent American past--the novel of his generation. King Tyler, though more and more estranged from the Revolutionary Army, has agreed to let the escaped prisoner use his cabin in the hills around Palo Alto. When a guard is killed during the escape, however, King finds that his role in events can no longer be that of a sympathetic bystander. He finds himself drawn into an entangling thicket of duty and fear; his marital problems and his sister-in-law's involvement in the escape; the deteriorating psychological state of the prisoner whom he is harboring; the persistent rumors that one of the radicals is an FBI informer; the increasingly ugly feuding among radical factions; and King's own complex relationship with his father, himself a communist in the 1930s. The Bad Communist ranges widely over the political and geographical landscape of California in the early 1970s; and it traverses, too, the extraordinary span of man's relationship to his fellows and his ideas. For King Tyler is caught between conflicting nations of duty to the law and to his friends, between his obligations to himself and to his politics--and between the forces of history and his own privacy. In The Bad Communist, Max Crawford, whose first two novels brought him wide recognition as one of the most exciting new writers in America, has written his best book--a complex and absorbing novel, a thriller that is also authentic in history.--Jacket.Read more...

Abstract:

1972. Nixon running for reelection, Watergate still a third-rate burglary, Vietnam raging, the dissident Left moving toward violence. In San Francisco, a Maoist organization makes plans to break a murderer out of prison. A splinter group descends into the nether world of conspiracy and perhaps assassination. A radical professor fights for his job at Stanford University. And King Tyler, a left-wing lawyer, finds himself at a crossroads in his life, an intersection of crises involving his wife, his father, and his politics. From these materials, Max Crawford has made a rich and important novel, a book that is at once riveting in its suspense and absolutely authentic in its evocation of the recent American past--the novel of his generation. King Tyler, though more and more estranged from the Revolutionary Army, has agreed to let the escaped prisoner use his cabin in the hills around Palo Alto. When a guard is killed during the escape, however, King finds that his role in events can no longer be that of a sympathetic bystander. He finds himself drawn into an entangling thicket of duty and fear; his marital problems and his sister-in-law's involvement in the escape; the deteriorating psychological state of the prisoner whom he is harboring; the persistent rumors that one of the radicals is an FBI informer; the increasingly ugly feuding among radical factions; and King's own complex relationship with his father, himself a communist in the 1930s. The Bad Communist ranges widely over the political and geographical landscape of California in the early 1970s; and it traverses, too, the extraordinary span of man's relationship to his fellows and his ideas. For King Tyler is caught between conflicting nations of duty to the law and to his friends, between his obligations to himself and to his politics--and between the forces of history and his own privacy. In The Bad Communist, Max Crawford, whose first two novels brought him wide recognition as one of the most exciting new writers in America, has written his best book--a complex and absorbing novel, a thriller that is also authentic in history.--Jacket.